Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Fruit Ninja by Halfbrick Studio

At the front screen, you will be greeted with several game options and the icons are made of real FRUITSSs. We love the design of the fruits as they are cute and juicy. Touching these fruits won’t help you select, you must SLASH it in order to proceed. See, you already get the feeling of the game even before the actual gaming session.

Let’s get the slashing started shall we. Slashing ‘New Game’ brings you into the fun part of this game. In the ‘Classic’ mode, you will be granted three ninja’s life and for each of the fruits that you missed, the life is deducted by one. The background music really makes you feels like a ninja in ancient Japan we must say. The sound effects of slashing the fruit are also awesome though we would like more varieties for different kind of fruits.Your main goal of the game is to keep all the fruits in PIECES. At this point, it may sounds like Fruit Ninja is a boring and easy-to-win game. If you have that in mind, then you are definitely wrong. Once in a while, a fruit bomb will be thrown into the screen and if you slash it by accident, you will be greeted with a white screen of DEATH. No matter how many ninja’s life that you had, the game is over once you happened to place your blade on those bombs. The game will get harder overtime while you maintain the fruit slash count and avoid bombs simultaneously. ‘Zen’ Mode is really self-explanatory. No bombs, no lives, 90 seconds.

Slashing ‘Dojo’ brings you to your private collections of sharp and shiny shinobi blades. You have 12 blades to choose from the Dojo and each of them will have different power and features. As you proceed in the ‘Classic’ game by making several difficult blades combos and critical slashes, you will unlock more blades that are cooler and shinier than before.For example, Mr. Sparkle’s Blade has yellow sparkles post animation following you whenever you perform a slash.At this point, we can’t help but feel like a Jedi wielding lightsabers.

There are two areas in the game that impressed us the most. The first one is the variety of cuts that one can perform on screen. The game basically covered all the possibilities and combinations of cuts and slashes that you can perform and all of them are registered correctly on the fruits. In a nutshell, you are not likely to miss any fruit cuts by performing some weird 720o-8-shape slashes. Another thing that impressed us is the multi-touch implementation. The screen can at most register 5 slashes which help a great deal in ‘Zen’ mode.

In short, Halfbrick Studio really did a good job in Fruit Ninja although some story and mission related gameplay would be even nicer. The game is just too casual at the moment. However, knowing that Halfbrick Studio is supporting the game frequently (just added a multiplayer gameplay recently), the game will only get better over time.